Machine translation is a sub-field of computational linguistics in which software is used to translate text (or speech) from one natural language to another. In its basic form, machine translation systems perform simple substitution of words in one language for words in another, but more sophisticated systems may use corpus and statistical techniques for improved recognition of whole phrases. Examples of existing web-based translation systems include Google Translate and Bing Translator.
Conventional translators allow manual text translation and/or webpage translation. With text translation, the user must navigate to the webpage of the translator, select a translation language from a “Languages” drop down box, then type or paste text to be translated into an “Enter text or webpage” box, and then click a “Translate” button to activate the translation. With Web page translation, the user performs the same steps except the user enters a URL of a webpage in the “Enter text or webpage” box instead of text. In some systems, the original language of the text or webpage can be automatically detected by the translation software. Further, Google Translate offers a service where visitors to a webpage have the option to view a translated version of a website.
While the automatic translation of an entire text (or selection thereof) or an entire webpage may be valuable to users, existing systems fail to take into account user language preferences for different types of content when browsing the Internet or even within a website. Many multi-language users, for example, may prefer to read different types of content in different languages.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide automatic machine translation of a text into multiple languages